5 Reasons Why The 2016 NATIVE Summit Is This Summer’s Most Important Media Event

The year goes by quickly, so quickly in fact, that it’s already time to get excited about the 2016 NATIVE Summit on July 19, to be held again at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco.

Sharethrough’s NATIVE conference series is now in its fourth year, serving throughout this time as a platform for publishers and brands to present their vision for the next chapter of the native story.

And there has never been a more exciting time for this conversation to be taking place. Native advertising is the future of media. The pace at which things are evolving is breathtaking. Native has emerged as a north star for the evolution of advertising; on one side driven by the technical and user experience expertise of Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google and on the other by the editorial savvy of leading media companies like CBS, The New York Times and The Atlantic.

With platform giants Google and Facebook set to speak and leading publishers like CBS and Politico sharing the stage alongside major brands and ad-tech innovators like The Trade Desk and AppNexus, the 2016 NATIVE Summit is an important event no matter what side of the media equation you’re on.

But for anyone on the fence, here are 5 reasons why this might just be the most important media conference of the summer.

Native ads are unmatched in their effectiveness

Native ads outperform their traditional equivalents at every stage of the purchase funnel: awareness, intent and conversion. Native drives brand lift that is twice as high as even social ads, native video boosts purchase intent by as much as 18 percent, and we’ve seen through our platform that clickthrough rates are roughly 10 times higher with in-feed native ads than banners. Placed in-feed, native ads receive more attention than even the editorial that surrounds them.

Native ads can be programmatically traded now

For years, native was written off as something that was bespoke and custom. The recently passed OpenRTB protocols now allow for native ads to be traded programmatically, putting an industry standard in place to allow for far greater scaling of native ads. Since they first passed in early 2015, Sharethrough has completed integrations with two of the largest DSPs in the world, AppNexus and The Trade Desk (both companies will be talking at NATIVE 2016).

Programmatic advertising is a huge market

The potential of an industry wide standard for programmatic ads is huge. According to Business Insider Intelligence’s 2015 Native Ad report, over half of all display ad revenue will come from real time bidding by 2020.